Custom Touchscreen Kiosk Using NASA World Wind

Using the open source NASA World Wind, Tekmap has developed a dual monitor touchscreen public kiosk. The project was developed for the Geological Survey of Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

The general requirements for this project were to provide an interactive "globe-type" environment for displaying and interacting with in-house GIS and other data. The NASA World Wind project was the perfect platform for this application. Tekmap developed a new custom interface with special handlers for specific data requirements, such as movies.

The basic layout of the World Wind Kiosk developed by Tekmap include:

• A 21 inch touchscreen monitor to display interactive menus and a World Wind globe.
• A large 32 inch HD TV monitor to display:
  • The World Wind globe duplicated from the Touchscreen.
  • Selected movies and images.

As part of the project, Tekmap developed a simple routine to export high resolution multibeam imagery from the GRASS GIS as World Wind tiles. The export program  calculates and creates the correct directory structure for the export tiles, plus it creates the associated XML file descriptor required by World Wind. The World Wind multibeam tiles are both Digital Elevation models (BIL) and color shaded imagery (DDS). The multibeam elevation models are incorporated with the existing World Wind elevation model at startup.

An important feature of World Wind is that it can operate offline with no internet connection. It simply requires that World Wind data  be cached beforehand. This was important because the Kiosk will be used by the public in areas that do not necessarily have access to the Internet.